The Role of Caring Adults in Helping Boys Become Men: Two Reviews

I’m nearing the end of a working draft of another young adult novel, this one about a 15-year-old boy from the wrong side of the tracks who loses his place in an elite academic program after a beating by three of his more privileged classmates leaves him with a severe concussion. As he approaches a crisis point, my protagonist, Nate, suffers from a dearth of caring adults who can show him the way. It’s not that adults don’t care. His mother and stepfather teach him survival skills, but they don’t want him to take the risks that will allow him to move beyond the world they know. His supervisor at the community center where he tutors younger children takes a tough-love approach to his mistakes, which makes him question how much he can trust her. A teacher reaches out, but ashamed at his failure, he avoids her and she doesn’t push him. As a result, Nate is falling through the cracks at a time when he needs to build his own future and be a role model for and champion of a friend’s gifted younger brother.

Two brand-new YA novels by local authors offer models of presenting teenage boys in crisis who find caring adults to show them the way. Eric Devine’s Tap Out, published by Running Press Kids, features a 17-year-old boy from a hardscrabble mobile home park similar to the one where my protagonist lives. Unlike Nate, however, his main character, Tony Antioch, does not have a stable home situation. His mother is a drug addict who has hooked up with a succession of abusive boyfriends throughout Tony’s life. The most recent one, Cameron, is connected to a meth-dealing motorcycle gang, and through Cameron’s nephew, a high school classmate of Tony’s, Tony is forced to join the gang.

When Tony disrupts a math class to get detention and avoid Cameron’s nephew, he ends up in the office of the principal, Big O, who makes him a deal. If Tony signs up for the mixed-martial-arts club run by Big O’s friend, Coach Dan, the principal will help him apply to college. Tony’s best friend Rob, one of Big O’s other “projects,” is a star of Coach Dan’s club, and through these two adult leaders, Tony learns to stand up for himself and care about his future. Unfortunately, the gang’s tentacles reach very deep into the boy’s life, and after Cameron puts his mother in the hospital, Tony finds few options to pay the medical bills or to protect her and himself.

Devine shows that gangs don’t only exist in urban areas and among racial and ethnic minorities, and in that way his depiction of Tony’s world counteracts a common stereotype. And while the families of “Pleasant Meadows” are shown as dysfunctional in the vein of Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (the book that was purported to have in part inspired Mitt Romney’s “47%” comment), neither Cameron nor his nephew hail from the park. (On the other hand, Rob from the park comes from a stable two-parent family.) More importantly, this novel, with its fast pace and vivid action, will appeal to that tough audience of teen boy readers. Boys will recognize the difference that caring adults can make and perhaps be motivated to become that kind of adult.

While Devine portrays a working-class teen struggling to survive, Brett Hartman in Cadillac Chronicles (Cinco Puntos Press) gives us a middle-class youngster who appears to have lost his way. Turning 16, Alex Riley has no friends, an extremely strained relationship with his mother, and no contact with his father since he was a toddler. Alex’s mother is a rising star in Albany politics, and to burnish her resume, she agrees to take in an elderly man—a retired GE engineer with multiple health problems—in a program that serves as an alternative to a nursing home. Lester Bray is black, and Alex doesn’t know what to make of that, as he’s never seen a person of another race up close. However, the lonely boy and the crusty old man bond over male talk and Alex’s sensitive drawings, and they both become thorns in Mom’s side. When she decides the arrangement isn’t working out, Lester and Alex conspire to run away in Lester’s pristine vintage Cadillac.

The two head south in search of Alex’s estranged father and Lester’s estranged sister. On the way, Alex learns to drive, and the two confront a racist cop and their own prejudices related to age, race, and sexual orientation. Alex grows on the journey as a result of his close relationship with a caring adult. Readers see him happy for the first time, developing a new sense of competence that a controlling parent had robbed him of, and able to see that relationships are not as clear cut as his mother and his peers have made him think. Alex’s psychologist—a rather unprofessional man—believes that the teenager could one day become the perpetrator of a school shooting like the loner at Virginia Tech. Through Lester, Alex makes the kind of connections that convince him he is not going to become a school shooter, and that, despite his social anxiety and awkwardness, if he makes an effort to make friends, he will succeed. In the course of Cadillac Chronicles we, like Lester, grow to like Alex and believe in him as he comes to believe in himself. This road-trip novel is full of humor and surprises that make it a delightful read for teenage boys and many girls as well.

Eric Devine will be speaking about Tap Out and signing copies at The Little Book House in Stuyvesant Plaza on Saturday, September 29 at 3 pm. Cadillac Chronicles will be available in bookstores beginning in October. Watch for Brett Hartman’s launch event coming soon.

Lyn Miller-Lachmann

5 Responses

Lyn, Sound like excellent books, and I hope more youngsters will be motivated to actually read!

As to the role of the right kind of adults in kids’ lives, there is research that shows both girls and boys are more likely to overcome a really dysfunctional home experience if at least one responsible adult in their lives takes them seriously, spends time listening to them, and validates their feelings and their right to their own opinions.

A local school superintendent is seeking to reverse the negative impact poverty can have on the ability of children to learn in school (not all poor children are learning handicapped and not all kids with learning difficulties are from poor homes, but poverty combined with chaos and dysfunction can be devastating.) This school official has determined that many of his faculty come from middle class, often suburban homes, and have little idea of the realities in the lives of many of the children they teach. Like one of the characters in the novels reviewed, some may even have grown up without any direct personal contact with black families or individuals or people from other cultures and countries. The urban school district in question has many children living in poverty and many children who are not middle class and white.

A child coming to school looking poorly groomed and perhaps withdrawn as well may appear to some teachers as less intelligent than the child really is if the teacher holds with some common negative stereotypes about appearance, class, and or culture.

The superintendent in question is looking for ways to assist his staff in looking at each child as an individual and adopting an attitude that each child very likely has the potential to learn a great deal more than the teacher otherwise thought. This is certainly a beginning in providing more kids with more positive interactions with caring adults.

Linda, I like your comment because of its real world connection to the healing effects that even one caring, responsible adult who enters the life of a child in a chaotic home situation, or a neighborhood with problems with gangs and violence can have.

I also think that your point about how teachers and school staff perceive a child has a great impact on his or her opportunities to learn and succeed. I recently read a study where the researchers picked out some children (randomly) in several classrooms and told the teachers that these children would make great gains in their learning levels and skills. The surprising result was that these children did advance rapidly. This indicated that the attitudes of their teachers towards them and their expectations of success led to that very outcome. So assumptions that teachers make on the basis of race, class, appearance or other characteristics of individual children may have strong effects on their learning and on their future potential.

Lyn, it’s interesting that you’re working on a novel about a teenaged boy encountering many of the problems unique to our particular time and society. The topic is an important one because the violence that we all encounter comes from the lack of caring adult role models during the times that our children, particularly boys, are coming of age and trying to find their way in the world.

To address your two reviews: The problems involving ambitious parents who use their children as props or proxies are very difficult ones, as described in your second review, but the really life threatening problems tend to happen in situations where drugs, gangs and addiction are involved.

In some parts of the world, including neighborhoods of the French City of Marseilles, teenagers who become involved with drugs and crime end up dead or imprisoned by the time they reach age 30. This is also true of some neighborhoods in the United States.

Knowing that the intervention of a caring adult can really make a difference is the first step in trying to solve these problems on a larger scale in environments where it seems that crime and violence are the only ways to survive.

As always, with your reviews it’s sometimes easier to confront painful struggles and realities, and get in touch with possible solutions to such wide-spread problems through fiction where we can view the information at a less threatening distance and then apply it to the world around us.

Linda, you make a good point in describing teachers who do not come from the communities where their students live and thus have a hard time understanding or reaching those students. One of the most inspiring books I’ve read in this area is Gloria Ladson-Billings’s The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children. Ladson-Billings uses teacher profiles and case studies to draw readers in and explore her idea that the teacher’s culture, race, or teaching style matters far less than her knowledge of the students and her ability to work with each student’s unique strengths. Most of the successful teachers were ones who lived in the same communities as their students and participated in the life of the community, so they could see the whole student–not just the one who showed up in the classroom.

#3, Lyn, some municipalities have attempted to require that all city employees live in the city that employs them. This is easier said than done.

It is a theory that people who live in the community will have more than a pay check to motivate them to serve the community well. And people such as law enforcement personnel and teachers may have the added advantage of a deeper understanding of the conditions in which they work.

As difficult as it is to implement such policies by fiat, the concept is worthy of discussion.

I wanted to add to this discussion by mentioning two very local, grassroots programs that have used the model of caring adults, and other teens from a specific community that is troubled by violence.

One is our very own Albany program SNUG, which is a violence interruption program that focuses on removing guns from the equation of community conflicts and teaching non-violent conflict resolution.

Then there is the CeaseFire program in Chicago founded by Ameena Matthews who grew up in the milieu of gangs and guns on the tough neighborhoods of Chicago and has worked tirelessly to interrupt violence before it begins and to counsel and comfort those who have lost children to gang violence.

You can see a brief article about her appearance here in Albany in June 2012, with links to more information at this link:

I personally believe that if formal programs are going to be effective they need to rise out of the affected communities themselves, where the knowledge, understanding and acceptance of those who are mentoring is genuine and not some rote formula for change.

And to return to Lyn’s novel in progress and the two books that she’s reviewed: There are always informal lifesaving interventions in the form of individuals who understand and can either choose to help or to encourage teens to recognize their self worth and their connection to the larger world.

The trouble with such an approach is that it really amounts to the “luck of the draw.” and only a few lucky kids receive the help that they need.

But it’s in learning about what kinds of relationships can provide a lifeline that we discover more about what kinds of small, local or regional programs might deliver such help to many more at risk youth.

Note: The Times Union is not responsible for posts and comments written by non-staff members.

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